Power of Labelling: Political and Media Discourses About the Russo-Ukrainian War

Abstract

The article discusses the political and media discourses about the Russo-Ukrainian War from 2014 to May 2022 in three countries: belligerents and the USA. The study compares how the hostilities were labelled across the countries. The State and its representatives have the power of labelling. By preferring some labels over others, they set the most general framework for interpreting the conflict. In this sense, the symbolic violence of labelling complements the physical violence of the battlefield. Although Russia first invaded Ukraine in 2014, the term “war” started to prevail in Ukrainian political and media discourses 8 years later. The impact of the war on the Ukrainians’ national consciousness could have been different if the discursive dimension of the hostilities in Ukraine better captured their nature from the beginning. The content analysis using a custom-built dictionary containing 76 categories (words and n-grams) of the 20-million-word trilingual corpus of presidential speeches and news items published by nine media (three in each country) informed the comparative study. This study demonstrates the potential of using dictionaries to advance cross-cultural discourse analysis.